from the emperor-has-no-clothes dept

It's really quite incredible how deeply in denial folks in the upper management at the NY Times appear to be about the paywall. In the last few days I've received some communications from some NYT staffers who seem to agree that the paywall itself is ridiculous, and is a backwards looking policy. As many have noted, the whole thing seems like a case of the Emperor's New Clothes anyway, since it's incredibly easy to avoid the paywall, either with some simple javascript or by just visiting from elsewhere. And yet, NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears to be in complete denial about all of this, claiming that only teenagers and the unemployed will bother to game the system.

"Can people go around the system?" Sulzberger, the Timesís publisher, asked at a roundtable discussion hosted by the Paley Center for Media this morning. "The answer is yes, just as if you run down Sixth Avenue right now and you pass a newsstand and you grab a newspaper and keep running, you can read the Times for free."

"Is it going to be done by the kind of people who value the quality of the New York Times reporting and opinion and analysis? No," he continued. "I don't think so. It'll be mostly high-school kids and people who are out of work."

This appears to be someone deeply in denial. First of all, even if it is just done by high schoolers, those high schoolers will grow up. And never subscribe. But, more importantly, he's just wrong. Yes, some people will pay, but many, many, many people who are both adults and employed, will simply avoid the paywall completely.

Every journalist I've spoken to since 2006 uses Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder. Funnily enough, there's a distinct lack of donations to the Wikimedia Foundation from newspapers and media organisations. How much did the New York Times donate in the fundraiser?

We do this stuff for everyone to use and reuse. Journalists taking full advantage of this is absolutely fine. But claiming we should then pay the papers for the privilege is just a little odious.

Marcus Carab, who works in a newsroom, made a similar point in response to that article a few weeks ago when the NYTime's Bill Keller claimed that the Huffington Post was a "pirate site," in that newspaper reporters rely on tons of other sources that never get any credit, let alone payment (excuse Marcus' Canadianisms, he can't help it):

Forget the fact that pavement-pounding reporting is a form of aggregation from the public - newspapers actively aggregate from tonnes of published sources too. Every newsroom has a table covered in copies of every other newspaper in town - in case you missed something, or they got an angle you didn't, or you think one of the stories can be taken further. In addition to reporting, all journalists do research: they look up other articles on the topic, find past magazine interviews and pull data from published reports. Many science articles in newspapers are just summaries of journal articles.

And that's just what went on and still goes on in the traditional media ecosystem, amongst the old players. Newspapers actively aggregate from blogs too. Every journalist in entertainment or technology starts his morning looking for leads on blogs, and the first thing any reporter does when they get an assignment on a topic they aren't familiar with is look it up on Wikipedia.

So this raises a really good point about the silly claims from the NY Times and others about how they need to get paid, since they believe that they're the "originators" of the news. I do wonder how many of the people at the NY Times did contribute to Wikipedia? I would bet many of the folks who insist that their own work needs to be paid for by users, have in turn never once contributed to Wikipedia.

Information comes in all sorts of forms from all sorts of places. The NY Times is good at what it does. No one is denying that. But it's delusional in its thinking that it somehow is the piece of the puzzle that is worth the most here.

from the simple-questions dept

As we continue to explore the NY Times' bizarrely pointless paywall, it comes as no surprise that the wall itself is barely any wall at all. It's not even a fence. It's basically a bunch of fence posts, and someone screaming: "Pay no attention to your own eyes. There is a fence here, and you should go round the front and pay at the entrance... unless someone sent you here. Then walk on through." That, of course, is bizarre, and it means that most people will never actually see any fence at all. But it gets even more bizarre when you discover that the "paywall" itself has apparently been written in javascript, meaning that when you do hit the wall, the full article you want to read actually loads in the HTML, it's just then blocked by some script asking you to pay up. That means it's even easier to remove than many had predicted (no need to even delete cookies or any such nonsense). In fact, that link above points people to NYTClean, a four-line javascript bookmarklet, that makes it easy to remove the paywall with (literally) the click of a button, should you actually encounter it.

Now, when I read that, my first thought was that certainly sounds like a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. The author is Canadian, so he may be protected for now, since Canada (thankfully) doesn't yet have an anti-circumvention clause that makes any such circumvention tool illegal -- though, the Canadian government is still apparently considering a law that would add just such a clause. Of course, to anyone who understands what's going on, that's ridiculous. Four simple lines of code to remove a javascript popup should not be considered a tool for infringement, but it is.

Of course, that got me wondering. I tend to use the always excellent NoScript extension when browsing, which turns off javascript, except on a few key sites where I enable it. If the stories about the NYT paywall being done in javascript are true, then I'll simply never run into it at all, no matter what I do.

So, here's the question: have I broken the law by using NoScript? I've used it for years, and it seems pretty ridiculous to claim that I now need to specifically go and whitelist the NYTimes just because it wants to hit me with an incredibly porous paywall. But, technically, I could see how an argument could be made that merely using NoScript makes me a DMCA violator by "circumventing" technical protection measures. Does this also mean that NoScript -- an incredibly useful tool -- has suddenly become a "circumvention device" overnight, because the NYTimes programmed an incredibly stupid paywall in javascript?

What this really should highlight is the massive problem with automatically outlawing all "circumvention" and "circumvention devices." It leads to particularly dumb situations like this, when a clueless newspaper puts up an amazingly poorly thought out paywall in a manner that makes very little sense.

from the they-don't-want-to-be-hidden dept

As we learned the last time the NY Times blocked its esteemed columnists off behind a paywall, those columnists really don't like being cut out of the conversation. So it's somewhat amusing, in the wake of the new paywall announcement, that star columnist Paul Krugman is already telling readers how to get around the paywall. Since it will be free to visit stories if you come in from elsewhere, Krugman is telling people an easy way to do so:

But for those who haven't [subscribed], arriving at this blog via links won't count against your ration of free nytimes.com views. As I understand it, for example, you can come in via my automated Twitter feed; and of course clicking on links at Mark Thoma or other blogs will also work.

Of course, in thinking about this, you have to wonder if there are going to be additional unintended consequences for the Times. For example, its home page is going to lose a lot of value, because each click now has a significant "cost." However, if you were to browse another site... say, one some third party set up that linked to the Times' articles, you could click those links without that cost. Your basic economics has to say that this harms the Times' own site while opening up opportunities for third parties to collect that traffic. It would be interesting if a Nobel Prize winning economist... such as Paul Krugman... decided to make that point to the geniuses in upper management at the NY Times.

from the living-in-delusion-land dept

The latest news on the NY Times' bizarrely uncompelling paywall experiment is that the people at the NY Times appear to be delusional about it. Peter Kafka has an interview with NYT digital boss Martin Niesenholtz in which he defends the paywall with some strange reasoning... including claiming that people feel guilty reading the NY Times for free:

I think the majority of people are honest and care about great journalism and the New York Times. When you look at the research that we've done, tons of people actually say, "Jeez, we've felt sort of guilty getting this for free all these years. We actually want to step up and pay, because we know we're supporting a valuable institution."

A few thoughts on this: first, it's a load of crap. I can't see that passing the laugh test. If they have research that says that, I'm willing to bet the research methodology was done poorly. At best, perhaps they asked the question in a way that made people embarrassed so they felt compelled to answer that way. News is free online. I've never heard anyone feeling "guilty" about not paying for news that was offered up for free on purpose. I mean, it makes you wonder, does anyone feel guilty for paying the subscription fees for a paper copy of the NY Times? After all, the subscription price doesn't even cover the printing and distribution costs, so if people feel guilty for not paying for the reporting, then they ought to feel guilty for paying the paper subscription price. But that's crazy.

More importantly, though, if they really believed that people felt guilty about it, they would just offer them up a way to pay what they wanted, voluntarily. Setting up a paywall with specific (and, at times, nonsensical) rules makes very little sense if you believe the key reason why people will pay is guilt. If the reason to pay is guilt, then just make it easy for people to do a pay what you want offering. But the Times didn't do that because they know, deep down inside, that very few people "feel guilty" for reading the NY Times without paying for it. Thus, they know that just asking people to pay won't work.

So why not just be upfront about why they're putting up the paywall? My guess is that the folks putting this together know deep down inside that this is a disaster in the making. It's why there's no value proposition being added here. All you get is a negative value proposition ("we won't block you at some point"). I doubt that the paywall will be a "disaster," just because the NYT's has a big enough core and loyal audience to get some to pay. I just can't figure out any way that it'll actually serve to really make the company that much money.

from the happy-to-help dept

Dear New York Times,

As a Canadian, I am writing to say what an honour and a privilege it is to be chosen as one of your preliminary test subjects for the dumbest business model imaginable. We don't get many chances to contribute up here in the untamed north, so the knowledge that we are helping to ensure "as smooth a transition as possible" for your real readers makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, like a Tim Horton's hot chocolate.

Your plan makes perfect sense. The average Canadian starts his day chopping down trees and ends it with igloo sex (which is awesome, by the way) so we don't need something to be "smooth" and "fine-tuned" unless it's an axe or a Chippewa concubine. So by all means use us as your whetstone before you go hacking away at the American market - we don't mind in the slightest. New York is still basically a mythical place to us, so every article you publish is like a dispatch from Oz, and who wouldn't want to pay for that?

Now, there are those who will tell you that your business model couldn't be more doomed if you opened a chain of in-temple money changers, which is no doubt why you wanted to try it out on Canadians before attempting any human testing. I for one pledge to live up to the faith you have shown in us: I will ignore the nay-sayers and become a lifelong subscriber, if only to prove how much more agreeable we northerners are than whiny yanks like Felix Salmon. Felix thinks you can evaluate things with math. If Canadians believed that, we'd move our currency off the Syrup Standard. However, as your goal is to improve the product, I will dutifully point out that even to us your pricing structure makes less sense than your country's bacon naming conventions.

So thank you New York Times for singling Canada out as the only place on the entire planet that deserves to test your unfinished product. Of course, it's not entirely clear why it's still unfinished, since the $40-million you spent developing it is more than the combined wealth of our entire nation ever since Celine Dion moved to Vegas, but we have faith nonetheless. I sincerely hope that, with our help, your paywall will be a big hit in the real world.

from the sounds-leaky dept

It's taken well over a year from when it was first announced, but the details of the NY Times' paywall are finally leaking. It seems to mesh with whatever hints NYT's execs have been making over the past year, in which they're trying to come up with a system that doesn't really piss off too many people -- and the end result sounds like an offering that isn't that appealing. It starts by rewarding the print subscribers -- getting the basic equation backwards. People who subscribe to the paper edition get stuff for free. But from there, it focuses on the iPad edition, which the NYT, like many other publications, seems to be betting on as the savior platform. The iPad app -- which is currently free -- is going to start costing money. The website itself will also cost money, but will let you visit a few times for free (like the Financial Times) and will let you visit via a Google search (like the Wall Street Journal). Basically, it sounds like there are so many holes in the paywall that the only people who pay will be folks who don't really care and would pay anyway. It almost makes you wonder why they don't just set up a donation bin instead, because people who are paying are effectively donating anyway.

105,000 people have paid for either the website and/or Kindle and iPad apps.

50% of those people chose a "monthly" subscription, rather than a one off.

100,000 print subscribers have activated the digital accounts that come with their paper subscription (i.e., no additional payment).

Trying to eliminate any "overlap" here, the company claims "close to 200,000" digital users.

Now, that's better than single or double digit numbers, certainly, but there's still plenty of reasons to be skeptical that these results represent any sort of success. First, the "close to 200,000" may be a stretch. Considering that they already admitted many paying users didn't get monthly subscriptions, it's a bit misleading to suggest that such folks are really "users" on par with subscribers. Second, I'm guessing there may be a bit more "overlap" than News Corp. seems to be assuming. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if many paper subscribers who also are addicted to their iPad/Kindles decided to subscribe to both.

But, more to the point, while they want to charge £2 per week, there has been a £1 per month "trial" option, which many people say they've signed up for just to see -- but there are indications that many have no interest in paying the full price.

On top of that, the real question is if News Corp. can actually make more money doing this, and there the numbers again break down. While the release itself repeatedly tries to play up how much "more valuable" these users are, the press release practically seems to be begging advertisers to come back, with transparent statements like "Many of the early adopters live in the UK, are relatively affluent and engage with the products frequently." That's a not-so-subtle coded attempt to entice back all the advertisers who have bailed.

Separately, the massive decrease in traffic to the websites is going to take a toll on ad revenue. Apparently, The Times Online went from 21 million unique visitors per month, down to 2 million for the Times and 700,000 for the Sunday Times. Of course, I'm again left wondering how that's the case if there are only 200,000 digital users. So, something doesn't quite add up there.

Even so... assuming that the traffic numbers are accurate, those are certainly in a range where I'm very familiar with what sorts of ad rates you can get for an online property whose users are "relatively affluent and engage with products frequently," and while they can support a small operation, it's a rounding error to an operation like News Corp. The traffic numbers just aren't that impressive for an operation that big.

Finally, the announcement tries to play down the idea that either publication has been taken out of the conversation, with someone claiming "Our stories get picked up in the echo chamber of the media," he said. "And readers comment on our stories." Note the weasel words. Do your stories get picked up more or less? I'll say that, pre-paywall, I quite frequently was sent to articles from The Times, and quite frequently linked to them. Since the paywall has gone up, there hasn't been a single time that someone has referred me to a story in The Times. Not once. And the fact that some readers comment again is not an indication that you're really a part of the conversation. How many sites are actually linking to stories? How much external traffic is being driven to the site? How many of those folks are converting. All of these things are numbers that actually mean something, and News Corp. seems silent on them... which is telling, as well.

Anyway, the announcement (of course) quotes James Murdoch saying how great these numbers are (what else is he going to say?). In a bit of interesting timing, next week, I'm actually going to be attending the Monaco Media Forum, where he's one of the co-chairs and will be giving a talk. I'm not yet sure if his talk is on-the-record (some are apparently not), but I'll see if I can pin him down on some of these numbers.

from the yeah,-good-luck dept

While I've still been linking to NY Times articles for Techdirt posts, if there are decent stories on the same subject elsewhere, I've been starting to use those other sources instead. That's because I know we're getting closer and closer to 2011 -- when the NY Times has promised to lock up its content behind a paywall. The company still keeps pretending that it can have the best of both worlds, and is apparently insisting that the paywall won't remove it from the wider conversation because it will allow a "first click free" sort of program, whereby you'll be able to read an article once if you click through from another site, before being asked to pay. While that might make the NY Times comfortable, it doesn't make me comfortable at all. If there are no other options, I may still link to NY Times content, but I'm certainly going to be a lot more cautious linking to it. Why would I even risk pissing off my readers by a lockout when I can point them to another site that actually wants that traffic?

from the totally-not-cool dept

Last year, I wrote about some issues I had with the way Scribd tried to avoid liability by suggesting that public domain documents couldn't be hosted on the site or that fair use was not allowed. To the company's credit, it responded quickly and fixed the situation, but soon after that I switched to (mostly) using Docstoc to host documents. Doctstoc has its own problems as well, but for the most part has worked well for me. Still, in my experience Scribd is still quite popular among folks -- especially for uploading and hosting legal documents. Apparently, the company recently made some quiet changes and it's seriously pissed off law professor Eric Goldman, who has relied on the site for quite some time.

The key problem? Without clear notification, it took "older" (and older is left undefined) documents and put them behind a paywall. As Goldman notes, the whole reason he used Scribd was to make the documents available, and it was quite a shock to suddenly find them behind a paywall:

Scribd's paywall stunt instantly put Scribd on my shitlist because it vitiates the reason I chose to use Scribd in the first place. I don't know that they ever promised me perpetual free access to the documents I post, but their value proposition always has been open access to the documents--freely shared with everyone and indexed in the search engines. The paywall destroys that value proposition. They've taken the documents that I wanted to freely share with the public (many of them public documents like court rulings and filings) and made them inaccessible. If my readers can't freely get the documents I wanted to share with them, then what's the point of using Scribd in the first place???

I also feel like Scribd used me. With their implicit promise of open access, they got me to share a lot of high-interest documents and generate lots of link love, then they flipped the default (from free to paywall) as part of a cash grab. I could check out of Scribd, but then I would break a lot of links and it would take a lot of time. So now I feel trapped. It's a terrible feeling.

Goldman is looking at other options, including Docstoc and Rapidshare. Another one worth checking out could be Slideshare, or even potentially Google Docs. However, all this has me thinking again about the wisdom of relying on third parties for such things (even though I do it myself). I do like the ability to display PDF documents, such as legal filings, embedded within a post, but I'm wondering if there are any simple solutions for setting up that sort of thing on your own server. Anyone know of any?